Hong Kong premiere of "To Singapore, with Love", followed by a Q&A with the director

Para Site is pleased to present the Hong Kong and China premiere of Tan Pin Pin’s To Singapore, with Love (2013), which tells a tale of bittersweet yearning through the lens of displaced Singaporean activists, student leaders and card-carrying communists—some who have not entered Singapore for 50 years. Barred from distribution and exhibition in Singapore in 2014, this film was cited as providing “distorted and untruthful accounts” of how these dissidents left Singapore and were deprived of their right to return. Through the narratives, we are given glimpses of Singapore’s imagined futures that unfolded over the tumultuous decades following the country's independence and nation-building process in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Tan’s documentary also takes us to the various provisional habitats built by political dissidents and their kin over the period of their exiles in Southeast Asia and United Kingdom. To Singapore, with Love shows us the everyday lives of these dispersed citizens and their ongoing contributions to society in spite of their abrupt dislocation from their homeland. Ranging from a doctor who fled to London and devoted her life to providing medical care to Palestinians to a young activist who became a human rights lawyer, their everyday lives are set against their long struggle “to go home”.

Tan Pin Pin is the award-winning director of Singapore GaGa. She is known for films that focus on Singapore and her histories, films which have screened in Berlin International Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, Vision du Reel, Flaherty Seminar as well as on Discovery Networks. She has won awards from Cinema du Reel and Taiwan International Documentary Festival for Invisible City, and was also awarded a Student Academy Award for Moving House. She is a board member of the Singapore International Film Festival. Previously, she was a board member of the National Archives of Singapore and The Substation, Centre for the Arts as well as a co-founding member of filmcommunitysg, an advocacy group for independent filmmakers in Singapore.

This event is the first in a series of public programmes connected with A Luxury We Cannot Afford, an exhibition opening at Para Site in September 2015. A Luxury We Cannot Afford, derives its name from a speech made by former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew at the University of Singapore in 1968 and an anthology of poems published by Math Paper Press in 2014. The Para Site project looks at Singapore’s grand rhethoric over the last 50 years and at the public and private liberties that have been sacrificed in the name of progress and prosperity，constructed by pragmatic neoliberal values. This exhibition is curated by Qinyi Lim.

The screening is hosted by School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. The event is free of charge, though seating is limited, so please register your participation through Eventbrite.

Para Site is financially supported by the Springboard Grant under the Arts Capacity Development Funding Scheme of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

The content of this activity does not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.